The Love of the Game

My daughter Georgia is like Brett Favre when it comes to sports. That is, Georgia will continue to play the game until you physically strip the ball from her dead lifeless hand. She played seven softball games in a tournament this past weekend in Watertown. Then, in the sweltering 90 degrees sunshine this afternoon, she agreed to fill in for two of the other teams who were short of players for tonight. That will make at least 17 games of ball in ten days. She doesn’t quit.

Georgia came into softball relatively late. She didn’t start playing until she was ten. She played tackle football with the boys for three years, and then came to the sad realization that she was never going to be big enough to continue in the sport. It is a boys sport by design, unless she wanted to be a place kicker, which she did not.

The transition into softball has been interesting. She loves the team quality and she has no fear on the field. Her first summer playing 10 and under, a lot of girls got struck with the ball. The pitchers were all young and inexperienced. A lot of the kids developed a fear of the ball, and had to overcome the instinct to jump out of the batters box. After a game, another parent asked Georgia why she was never afraid of the ball .

“It’s smaller than a linebacker,” she answered with a sly smile. My kid is cool.

Because Georgia came into the sport later, she’s had to struggle to catch up. She plays both recreation league ball and competitive travel ball. In rec ball, she shines. The amount of time and practicing and coaching involved in travel ball assures that she’s going to continue to get better, because she spends so much more time playing.

In travel ball, Georgia pines for time in the infield. I am astounded at times at her resolve. She’s remarkably stubborn, she always has been. There are downsides to the self assured, strong willed child, though. Like toddler hood. That was a daily battle. But now, those same qualities that made me pull my hair out are the ones that have made her the kid who sings solo in front of a room of 300 people at her school talent show. The kid who tries for Secretary of the student council as a new sixth grader and beats out the eighth grade cheerleader, becoming the first sixth grade officer at the school. And the kid who spent nearly nine months trying to learn a cartwheel, when her kid sister got it on the second try. The first six months, the cartwheels were so ugly that even I wanted her to stop trying, but she didn’t give up. She spent years working and finally learned the back flip her sister Holly had learned at age six. Georgia wasn’t going to let that go, she was going to learn to do a backhand spring if it killed her. It took her over three years before she did one on her own. Even at age twelve, I think Georgia is one of the best examples I know of someone truly cultivating their own life.

When Georgia filled in at rec ball tonight, she only had her orange Storm t-shirt from her own team, and the other teams didn’t have any extra shirts, so she stood out on third base like a sore thumb among all the blue shirts of her temporary teammates. She didn’t seem to notice, and eventually, I don’t think anyone else did either. She caught a line drive down the third base line to end an inning with bases loaded and the crowd cheered. She got two tag outs, and was dead on with all her throws to first base.

I watched her from the stands, this strange mixing of team colors each game, and I realized that she reminded me of Brett Favre again. Not for the changing of teams, but for the way she played the game, no matter where she was playing. Because she was playing first for the love of the game. Anything else was extra.

Be Good, Get Good, or Quit

Nights like tonight inevitably make me feel like I am a bad mother. It’s 10:30 when I climb the steep wooden stairs to our bedrooms with my always present orange backpack on my back. I haven’t been home since five, when we head out to Watertown for gymnastics.

I hear Holly before I see her, as I round the corner at the top of the stairs. Her tiny muscular body is upside down in a handstand, her toes pointed perfectly, her core holding her still. She still has her Olympic replica leotard just like Shawn Johnson’s on, her blond hair still held up in clips. Beside her on the floor is the wrapper from a Fiber One pop tart that was her dinner, or snack, since she ate a bowl of cereal before we left. She releases the handstand into a bridge, her feet echoing through the hard wood floors. She flips back out of the bridge and looks at me, her hands poised above her head gracefully.

“I know. Go to bed.” She tells me before I have the chance to say it.

“Yes. Go to bed. And pick up your wrapper,” I tell her, pointing to the flimsy silver material on the floor. “Somewhere is going to eat it.”

Somewhere, our ten-month-old puppy, is at my heels. She’s nearly always at my heels. She’s especially rambunctious because I didn’t let her run at the park today. I needed to run three miles, and it was my turn. She has a stuffed animal, a small cat, in her mouth. She’s chewed off only the little face, but the rest of the toy remains intact, including its ears. She’s bumping its soggy body against the back of my knees to play. We’ve named it, just like we do with all her toys. This one is Kitten Without A Face. The three legged pink dog is named Tripod, obviously.

I head toward my room and Georgia comes out of hers, her radio blaring. She sings as she dances by me, as if it’s four in the afternoon and not ridiculously late. I tell her to put on her pajamas and put some Aquaphor on her sunburn, which is now peeling. Despite lathering my fair skinned child in sunscreen at her first softball tournament of the season over the weekend, she burned. Georgia concedes about the Aquaphor without much complaint tonight, and comes out of the bathroom looking like a melting wax figure. I kiss her hair instead of her face and shoe her into her room. I will be shocked if she doesn’t come back out at least once. She doesn’t give up.

They have school tomorrow, so why don’t they want to go to bed? I want to go to bed. I will lose my mind if I don’t have at least one quiet hour without hearing the word “Momma.” I love them dearly, but I need them to be silent now.

These days are long, and as the girls grow older, there are more and more of them. Band concerts, chorus concerts, talent shows, gymnastics competitions, softball practices, student council and safety patrol trips fill our waking moments. I silently wonder at times if this is right. They grow so fast. These things they do, these places that I spend countless hours driving them to, they pull my children farther into the world. Farther from me.

At gymnastics practice, one of the hard core coaches calls Holly out on a low back tuck. She’s concerned about Holly hurting herself and she doesn’t mince words. “Holly! That was the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen. Go back and do it again, but it better be higher.”

I can see from across the room that Holly is angry. She walks slowly and deliberately across the floor, an invisible cloud of steam coming from her ears. Holly is harder on herself than anyone else ever could be. I momentarily think of protecting her, knowing that she can do far better than what she just did. I excuse her in my head because she had a track meet at school and I think she must be tired.

By the time she crosses the floor to try again, every one of the members of her team is watching her. She takes a breath and takes off across the room. She commits to it this time, and flips six feet off of the blue floor, her backward somersault setting in the air, as if she’s momentarily suspended upside down. She lands it perfectly, and finishes with her hands posed. A grin flashes across her face, but it isn’t me she looks at with pride. It’s the coach who pushed her, who called her out. They are grinning at each other, as if they share a secret. I feel almost bad for even thinking about defending her. This woman knew how to deal with Holly. It was between them, and I had no place in it. I watch the concentric circles that my children orbit in my life inch a little farther outward. And I remember why I’m here.

I drag my children all over the state for sports because I think that it gives them something they would be missing otherwise. Throughout history, children had jobs of one sort or another that helped with the family’s survival. As humans have evolved as a species, we’ve made childhood a jobless existence. Maybe a chore or three, but childhood became for playing. There’s nothing wrong with playing, but its lack of structure fails to provide our children the true lessons of working with others, and the value of actual hard work.

I see parents trying to make the world fair and perfect for their children, and I feel that it’s a disservice in a way. The world isn’t like that, and it never will be. As parents, we should not merely provide an illusion of what they world “should” be, but also show them what it really is.

When I take my child to the gym, or the ball field, I let others mold and shape them. They learn their place, and learn that if they don’t like it, they have to change it. Our motto for this, and most things in life, is that there are three ways to do things: Be good, get good, or quit.

So far, no quitting for any of us.